Firefox is famous for its addons, and for good reason: they can make your browser do just about anything. But which addons are the most useful? Here are the addons we think are best, what they do, and where you can find them.

Enjoy! Also let us know if we’ve missed anything, okay? We have been updating this list semi-regularly.

Bookmarks

If you’re using the web for research, you need to save what you find fast. Plus, you need to be able to access it just as quickly. These bookmark add-ons can help you do both.

SiteLauncher offers a quick and easy way to access your favorite sites. Use the button in your toolbar to display your saved sites, click the one you want, and you are on your way. You can use and assign hotkeys, show the launcher as the home page when you start your browser, and customize the fonts, sizing, and colors.

If you like having your most visited sites on a toolbar, but often run out of room, check out Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar Plus. With this handy tool, you can display your bookmarks in in multiple rows. You can pick the number of rows, use folders, enable automatic hiding, and choose from text and icon displays.

Clipping

Many times you need to note a few sites for future reference. Here are tools for saving those relevant bits of information without leaving your browser.

Sometimes, while researching, you need to quickly write something down. If you’d rather keep everything in the browser, QuickFox notes lets you write and save notes with a tabbed interface.

Custom Browsing

Firefox isn’t just a tool you can use: it’s something you can make personal, and use to make the web look however you like. Here are some addons that let you do just that, by changing how you browser behaves or adding quick tools to the right-click menu.

This handy addon brings back some of the buttons, tab preferences, and toolbar options from previous Firefox versions. There are many customization options such as changing tab location, different sizes and modes for menu icons, and options for closing tabs and opening panels.

Customize the way your favourite websites look with scripts. This addon is legendary, though possibly less useful with the decay and eventual death of UserScripts.org. GreasyFork is probably the best place to find scripts now.

Developers

FireGestures is a convenient add-on for executing commands with mouse gestures. You can easily configure your mappings by editing current ones or adding new scripts. Enable or disable wheel, rocker, keypress, and tab wheel gestures. And, if you have a touchscreen, you can use and adjust the swipe gestures.

When you need a little help with search engine or social media optimization, SeoQuake SEO Extension is a terrific tool. With this addon, you can investigate site parameters, view keyword density for phrases, look over site compliance data, and see the internal and external links.

Back up and rebuild your Firefox extensions with FEBE. Decide what to back up along with where and when. The addon’s options include reminders, cloud service connections, and import and export tools. You can also perform a quick backup or restore right from your main menu.

Connect To Mobile

Firefox syncs your bookmarks and open tabs with its mobile version, but you can send a lot more than that to your phone. Here are tools for getting content from your desktop Firefox to you other devices.

Pushbullet is a great tool for sending and syncing information to and from most anywhere quickly. You can send a link, share a screen shot, type a message, or drop a file between your devices or even to other people. The tool also lets you send to multiple devices at one time, show notifications, and add a password for end-to-end encryption.

Music and Video

There’s a lot of great media online, and Firefox is a good browser to enjoy it with. But are there tools that can make streaming, and downloading, a bit better? Of course there are.

If you like to find and download media – images, videos or music – you’re going to want this legendary addon. One click lets you download every piece of media linked to on a page, or every image on that page.

Another downloader to check out is Flash Video Downloader. You can download video, audio, and image files in formats like MP3, MP4, and SWF. When you land on a site with downloadable content, just click the add-on button in your toolbar. Available options from the page will display and you simply click the Download button. You can also mark the media types you want to search for on the page with the options at the top of the pop-up window.

For blocking invisible trackers and spying advertisements, Privacy Badger has you covered. With simple settings like whitelisted sites, a badge icon for trackers, and an easy slider to adjust blocking and cookies on particular websites.

Create passwords in your browser with the LessPass add-on. When you visit a website that you want to generate a password for, just click the button in your toolbar. Make sure you complete the site (automatically populated), login, and master password fields and click Generate. You can also click the Settings button to configure advanced options such as letters, numbers, characters, and length.

Shopping Enhancers

Finding the best price is way easier in your browser than it is at the mall, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be even easier. Here are the best Firefox tools for the job.

Shoptimate is a convenient tool for comparison shopping because it works automatically while you are viewing a product. You will then see the lowest price and where to obtain it pop right up. There is also a button to view additional prices and locations and you can click to go directly to another store on the list.

The AddThis extension has hundreds of sharing options from popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to less familiar options like Amen Me!, Fashiolista, and Links Gutter. You can also print easily or send via email.

Share This is another addon that allows you to share to many locations. It does not currently have hundreds, but it does have the most popular sites. Facebook, Twitter, Buffer, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are among the options and email sharing can be done using Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Outlook.

Control and customize your tab options with Tabs Mix Plus. This extension lets you manage opening, closing, and merging tabs. You can also adjust mouse gestures and clicking, context menus, and the opening of new pages. In addition, you can check out the session manager within the tool.

If you work with a lot of tabs open at one time, then Tab Grenade is awesome. This tool can help you get where you need to go without clicking each tab. With the click of a button, closes all tabs for you and places their links in one spot. You can then open one or all of them back up, remove the group, or close just one at a time.

For a quick way to see how much memory each of your tabs is using, check out Tab Memory Usage. This easy-to-use add-on displays the amount of usage in your toolbar and is configurable per your taste. You can adjust the color code for memory usage from zero to 100 percent. You can also exclude certain sites or include specific ones, display only high amounts, and adjust the icon badge and label setting.

Task and Time Management

You can stay productive right in Firefox without opening other apps. These tools help you stay on track with your tasks and your valuable time.

Another terrific task list option for Firefox is ReminderFox. You can create reminders and to-dos, choose start and end times or pick the All Day option, pick a category, and have events repeat. Set up an alarm for a number of minutes, hours, or days before the event is due. You can also view your tasks and reminders in list view, calendar view, or both.

Don’t lose track of time while you are online, use TimerFox. With this basic timer, just set the hours, minutes, and seconds and add an optional a message. Click OK and when time is up, a pop-up box will display. This very simple tool can remind you when it is time to move on.

Originally written by Justin Pot. Last updated by Sandy Stachowiak on 20 June 2017.

The best Firefox enhancement is called Palemoon, a third party fork of Firefox from before Mozilla went nuts. I also note that this article skipped ad and script blocking tools, but there are certainly plenty of good options for that.

Note: Remember, if you read the comments, the article is a rewrite of a rewrite of a rewrite, so the information is dated. A number of add-ons will never work with the new architecture of FF and requirements. Take it with a grain of salt.

Palemoon is based on an old Firefox codebase, and many addons think it's Firefox 27! The best Mozilla-based browser was Cyberfox x64, but the developer has quit for health reasons, so I've switched to Waterfox, which gets updated a day or two after the main Firefox.

Waterfox is essentially just copying Mozilla code and trying to maintain XUL at this point. While that's better than what Mozilla itself is doing, I'm happier with the Palemoon decision to fork from the decidedly less stupid pre-27 Firefox codebase, including the pre-27 Firefox UI. Palemoon is at this point its own distinct browser, one where I can get the full degree of customization, security and privacy features I want without having to deal with the ongoing stupidity of Mozilla's fresh new ways to turn its browser in to yet another clone of Chrome.

As for the question of Waterfox vs. Palemoon, I found that Palemoon uses less RAM per tab and has fewer problems with add-ons being invalidated by updates. I'm not having to fiddle with the UI or remove unwanted features. Waterfox just isn't bringing anything to the table as far as I can tell.

+1 WOT has security problems
HOLA has been collecting data of users
Ghostery was selling data and doesn't update often any more, once a month? So it is no longer wonderful!
Adblock Plus has been selling user data.
Better options are Adguard, free as a browser extension can whitelist sites or
uBlock Origin also free.
Privacy Badger is great!
Where is Duck Duck Go?

[Tab Management]
There is also TabDeque which is wonderful.
Simply click on the current tab to "minimize" it and get back to the last tab you were coming from, and so on.
Nice to get back on your tab switching historical track.

I would suggest FireGesture (http://www.xuldev.org/firegestures/) or any good mouse gesture add-on. It completely changed the way I browse. But be careful, mouse gestures are addictive and once you start using them you'll be trying to use them in every program, not just in FireFox!

Was hoping to see SiteLauncher on the list, http://www.donesmart.com/sitelauncher/ - it's a speed dial extension but better, because it offers keyboard shortcuts and overlays the current page, so faster than opening a new tab first.

There used to be a great image down loader, but it was changed to VIDEO LOADER Ultimate and I can not get it to work.
And the old "Downloadhelper" disappeared from the add-ons.
This site seems to not mention even ONE to download pictures or images from a web page using Firefox add-ons.
ANYONE found a good and reliable image or picture down-loader that can download the entire page?

Wouldn't right clicking on the page you want to save and then from the drop down menu select "save page to "or "save page as" work in the situation of full page downloads work ?
I am sure there are other ways to go about this in the newest version of Firefox , but all versions should have this as an option.

I also have been using ever since I learned about it, which was approximately 10 minutes after using internet explorer .

Of course this change did not happen until I wasted a year on AOL and finding new ways to get free months of time from them ..... and one day I woke up and found out that the internet isn't just AOL and can be gotten in much better way like Comcast, a decision I'm starting to think might get tossed into the AOL pile if a better provider comes to my area.

Unfortunately for me they are the fastest and best provider I've got ATM !!!!

"Do you just go to every tech blog and rant all day long??"
Do you follow me around the Internet so you can say with certainty that I rant on every tech blog? Or are you just generalizing based on one post?

"Seems you hardly ever have anything nice to say."
Let's analyze my comments. Every so often MUO publishes an article with a title like "The X Best add-ons for NAME browser. Since I've been reading MUO, various authors have recommended a total of somewhere around 50 add-ons. When MUO recommends something, readers, especially those with less PC experience, start using the recommended add-on or product. It has been my experience that many people download and use all the "convenience" and "appearance" add-ons they can find in the name of customization. Then they complain that their browser is slow. Unfortunately, the more add-ons you have running, the slower your browser becomes. IIRC, in the past year MUO had a poll on how many add-ons people use. If I am not mistaken, the most common number was around 100 add-ons, with a number of users having more than 300 add-ons. Hence my comment.

BTW - I made no comment about the quality of the suggested add-ons. Mozilla/Firefox vet their add-ons pretty well so that bad ones are few and far between.
At least five of MUO's regular writers, at one time or another, have written anti-AdBlock articles saying , in so many words, that ad blocking software "is destroying the Internet." Other MUO writers have expressed the same sentiment while responding to user posts. MUO writers aciduously avoid ever mentioning AdBlock and NoScript, except in a negative manner. Hence my comment.

There are many who have FREE informational sites who do not sell anything. The only way these sites are able to exist is through showing ads. It is not ethical for people to use those sites with an ad-blocker on.

"The only way these sites are able to exist is through showing ads. "
If their content is so crappy that they have to rely on ads, then maybe they no business existing. There is no God-given or Constitutionally guaranteed right for any business to exist, Under capitalism, if you follow the wrong business plan, you are gone. Relying on ads is the wrong business plan. Porno sites and political sites are not complaining about ad-blockers but they have interesting content.

" It is not ethical for people to use those sites with an ad-blocker on."
But it is ethical for those sites to steal my bandwidth with ads for products I will never even look at? I am the one paying for bandwidth, not the sites that object to my use of ad-blockers.

Lazarus is, for all intents and purposes, dead--I'm sad to say that, as it was a long-standing favorite of mine. I switched to Form History Control last month, which is working well for me so far (though it's a bit more powerful, and consequently more complicated, than Lazarus).

you're dead wrong ! I'm a ff user since beta. never been a built-ins. (adding to search bar is limited ONLY to SOME websites that allows this initially).
and about Omnibar I guess you didn't read just looked at the images.
In addition to the wrong info, being offensive is something nobody like to read here. thanks and goodbye!

With her BS in Information Technology, Sandy worked for many years in the IT industry as a Project Manager, Department Manager, and PMO Lead. She then decided to follow her dream and now writes about technology full-time.